Pity the Children: 'War on Drugs' Fuels Asylum Seekers

I am not sure if there is a moral to recent events, but the number of children seeking asylum in the United States from gang warfare-torn countries El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras has dropped in the last month. What to do with these young people has given rise to a fierce debate Stateside on an issue Obama would likely prefer not to deal with domestically at this point in time: immigration reform. With an ever-growing Latino population, the stakes are high for center-left politicians like him. Even so, the Tea Party brigade is hung up on antiquated notions of perpetuating white majority rule despite demographic trends showing they will be less than half the population by mid-century.

In the meantime, however, stricter enforcement coupled with disabusing would-be migrants of the delusional idea that the US was granting asylum have played their part in staunching arrivals. From the Arizona Republic:

The number of children and families apprehended by the Border Patrol
in July crossing the U.S.-Mexican border illegally fell by more than
half from June, according to Customs and Border Protection. The
significant drop reverses the recent surge in unaccompanied children and
families fleeing north from Central America, and analysts cited a
combination of reasons including tougher anti-smuggling measures.

The
decline is much sharper than the fall in overall Border Patrol
apprehensions from June to July. And it is steeper than in past years —
suggesting that it's not just hotter weather that is drying up the flow
of migrants coming primarily from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. "I
don't think this is a seasonal shift," said Doris Meissner, a senior
fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan Washington think
tank that deals with migration and refugee policies.

"I think
it's a combination of factors: stepped up anti-smuggling efforts, the
fact that Mexico is returning substantially larger numbers of people
crossing their territory ... and the fact that the countries themselves
have been making a huge effort to tell people that what the smugglers
are saying is not true and that the journey is really dangerous," added
Meissner, who served as a commissioner in the former U.S. Immigration
and Naturalization Service.

Believe it or not, I do not enjoy bashing the United States for the heck of it. Given its far-reaching influence, however, it bears much culpability here. Why are there gang wars in these central American states that are driving young people to leave? Because the United States' admittedly failed "war on drugs" is causing violence to spread to its backyard. Why is demand so great for illegal drugs? Because United States residents (can't use "American" in this context) consume more of them than any other country on Earth:

The refugee crisis is now our problem, which is appropriate: The
drug-linked violence that the children are fleeing is in large part our
fault. Anti-drug policies in the U.S. and Europe have not succeeded in
curbing drug use or in raising drug prices, but they have considerably
increased crime and violence worldwide. It is time to shift the effort
to focus on helping drug users at home rather than battling drugmakers
and traffickers abroad...

Some in the U.S. may still consider the mission accomplished: at least
we’ve sent the problem elsewhere. But if the point of banning domestic
production was to reduce domestic consumption, the effort has been a
miserable failure—with the side effect of 60,000 kids to care for.
Because production can move to countries least able to control output
and trade can flow through countries least able to control transport,
even the most draconian attempts to reduce overseas supply to U.S. drug
consumers have had a limited impact. The U.S.-backed Plan Colombia
represented an immense effort to reduce cocaine production—the size of
the country’s security forces expanded from 250,000 to 850,000 between
2003 and 2006. In response, farms became more productive, and production
shifted to neighboring countries, more than offsetting the increase in
drug seizures and coca plant destruction according to World Bank researchers. A U.S. inspector general report suggests attempts to wipe out poppy production in Afghanistan have been a similar failure.

The lure of the US market increases as even more regulations are put in place to combat drugs:

Efforts to control international trafficking–the transport of drugs from
producers to drug sellers in the U.S.—have been a little more
successful than efforts to control production. The spread between
cocaine export prices in Colombia and import prices in Miami reflects a
2,100 percent markup (from about $1,000/kg to $23,000/kg). That
associated potential profit margin is what helps fuel gang violence in
Central America. But for all the violence of the drug wars in Mexico and
Honduras, the big cost of drugs in the U.S. is still accounted for by
domestic wholesale and retail distribution costs. The markup from
wholesale to retail is about 700 percentnot too different
from the markup for imported agricultural products in general. The drug
war has considerably destabilized countries in Central and South
America and cost tens of thousands of lives—and yet it hasn’t even
worked to make drugs in the U.S. or Europe appreciably more difficult to
obtain than legal imports.

Just as Prohibition-era gangsterism came to an end with legalizing alcohol, legalizing marijuana in the United States is long overdue to reduce incentives to smuggle drugs into the US for the chance at an exorbitant profit. In this case, the Yanks really should do so on behalf of the children who are victims of the trouble they inflict on neighboring countries.